[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Brent Allsop]

It is really powerful to be able to ask AI questions about this.
I'm still working on getting my head around all this interesting stuff.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 8:12 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> BillK thought an AI overview of the paper would be useful. I had GPT 6
> Astra MAX review and summarize the paper here:
>
> https://chatgpt.com/share/6aadee51-ce44-83ea-a75a-f91e5a763950
>
> You should also be able to branch off this chat and ask AI any other
> follow up questions, as I realize much of the terminology used in this
> field can come across as impenetrable jargon.
>
> Jason
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 9:46 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As some of you may know I have been fascinated by questions of
>> consciousness for many years and have endeavored to write a book on it. The
>> past five years I have been focused on that writing which has resulted in
>> hundreds of pages of material:
>>
>> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-SMVWgQFfImXNRRuuB9kQwhgxPLAwxYL
>>
>> About a week ago, I decided to try to use the latest AI models to take
>> all the ideas in that book and condense it to a comparatively short
>> academic paper, which I am now in the process of submitting for publication.
>>
>> I thought some on this list, interested in both the possibility of
>> machine and AI consciousness, as well as the question of how do we
>> empirically establish the minimum required fidelity for restoring a mind
>> through brain scanning and uploading, may be interested in what this paper
>> has to say, as it treats with both of these topics among many others. Here
>> is the abstract:
>>
>>
>> "Computational functionalism treats cognition as implemented information
>> processing, but leaves open why experience exists, what determines its
>> character, which process possesses it, and how it affects behavior. This
>> paper develops the centered-knowledge thesis: when alternative conditions
>> select distinct internal states that guide a process’s continuation, that
>> process knows the difference; possessing that knowledge is the phenomenal
>> difference. The complete organization of the process’s distinctions and
>> their causal roles constitutes its phenomenal character. The access
>> relations that make those distinctions jointly usable individuate the
>> subject and explain binding and privacy. This identity supplies a
>> constitutive answer to the hard problem: the explanatory gap arises when
>> third-person descriptions omit the relation between a usable distinction
>> and the process for which it is knowledge. A subtraction argument locates
>> the phenomenal minimum by stripping away report, memory, affect,
>> reflection, recurrence, and global broadcast while preserving the operative
>> distinction. From this thesis, the paper derives organizational invariance,
>> the substitution principle, and multiple realizability, yielding criteria
>> for how fine-grained neural replacement, brain scanning, and emulation must
>> be to preserve experience. The boundary that individuates a subject is also
>> its epistemic horizon: what the subject knows underdetermines its history,
>> program, substrate, and world. The centered-knowledge thesis yields
>> consciousness attributions distinct from those of global neuronal
>> workspace, higher-order, and integrated information theories for
>> feed-forward systems, faithful emulations, and overlapping centers. We
>> provide an empirical research program with explicit falsification criteria.
>> Consciousness is the inside of a difference that guides a process from
>> within."
>>
>>
>> And here is a link to the paper:
>>
>>
>> https://zenodo.org/records/22693134/files/epistemic_horizons_resch_philpapers.pdf?download=1
>>
>>
>> I would greatly appreciate any feedback, questions, comments, or
>> discussion.
>>
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